I'm feeling quite sick now as I may have just wasted about 8 hours/10hrs over the last 2 days installing pdaXrom, installing packages, editing config files and tweaking things only to have it wrecked by trying out the e17 installer which I let remove Matchbox.
Not wanting to be made a fool of again, if I end up having to do a fresh install (arrrrrrrgh!) then once I have everything set up exactly how I want it would it not be possible to create an image of my MD which I could backup and restore should anything like this happen again?
I only have the one (root) partition so I'm thinking I could tar it all up and then if something like this or worse happened again I could boot up holding D+B, stick the CF containing the tar file into the Z, format my MD and then extract the tar image onto the MD. Would that work? Anybody actually tried it?